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Professor Harry Wu (in Chinese Wu Hongda 吳弘達) (born 1937) is an activist for human rights in the People's Republic of China. Now a resident and citizen of the United States, Wu spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, for which he popularized the term laogai.
Wu was born in Shanghai. He came from a wealthy family; his father was a banker, and his mother was descended from landlords. He recalls his childhood as being one of "peace and pleasure" but that these fortunes changed after the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949:
- "During my teen-age years, my father lost all his properties. We had money problems. The government took over all the property in the country. We even had to sell my piano." *
Wu studied at the Geology Institute in Beijing, where he was first arrested in 1956 for criticizing the Communist Party of China, during a brief period of liberalization in China known as the "Hundred Flowers Campaign". In 1960 he was sent to the laogai ("re-education through labor"), the Chinese labor camp system, as a "counter-revolutionary rightist." He was imprisoned for 19 years in 12 different camps mining coal, building roads, clearing land, and planting and harvesting crops. According to his own accounts, he was beaten, tortured and nearly starved to death, and witnessed the deaths of many other prisoners from brutality, starvation and suicide.
Released in 1979 in the liberalization which followed the death of Mao Zedong, Wu left China and went to the United States, where he became a visiting professor of geology at the University of California at Berkeley. There he began writing about his experiences in China. In 1992 he resigned his academic post and became a human rights activist dedicated to exposing the truth about China. He established the Laogai Research Foundation, a non-profit research and public education organization. The work of the foundation is recognized as a leading source of information on China's labor camps. Wu has testified before various United States Congressional committees, as well as the British, German and Australian Parliaments, the European Parliament and the United Nations.
In 1995 Wu, by then a U.S. citizen, was arrested as he tried to enter China with valid, legal documentation. He was held by the Chinese government for 66 days before he was convicted in a show trial for "stealing state secrets." He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but was immediately expelled from China. He attributes his release to an international campaign launched on his behalf.
Wu received the Freedom Award from the Hungarian Freedom Fighters’ Federation in 1991. In 1994 he received the first Martin Ennals Human Rights Award from the Swiss Martin Ennals Foundation. In 1996, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom from the Dutch World War II Resistance Foundation. He also received honorary degrees from St. Louis University and the American University in Paris during 1996.
Wu is currently the Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation and the China Information Center. Both organizations are located in the Washington, DC area and are funded principally by the National Endowment for Democracy.
Books
- Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (1991), the first full account of the Chinese labor camp system.
- Bitter Winds (1994), a memoir of his time in the camps.
- Troublemaker (1996), an account of Wu's clandestine trips to China and his detention in 1995.
External links
Chinese Americans | Chinese dissidents | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Human rights activists
"Harry Wu"